Wood Carving Basics -- How to Carve a Swedish Horse

So I'm half Swedish and around the holidays my parents would always put out Dala horses. It's a form that I've always really liked and a couple years ago I decided to try and make one myself. So I carved this one and I had so much fun carving it that it's become kind of an annual tradition. So I'll carve one and then give it to a friend or a family member. This weekend, Ann of All Trades has invited me out to her workshop and I thought I'd make a great thank you gift for having me out there. I also thought it would be great to bring you guys along because this is a perfect entry-level carving project. So if you are interested in getting into wood carving, this is a great place to start. So stick around and I'll show you how it's made. So I'm going to work with a block of basswood that I have here. Basswood is a great entry-level carving wood because it's nice and soft. One of the things you'll note on my original one is that I oriented the grain this way, which is not a very strong direction because the legs can crack along that line. So this one I'm going to orient in the other direction. This is just an off-cut from a previous year's carve, but I'll post a template online. All right, over to the bandsaw. This blank is a little bit thick for this. Before I cut this off, I'm going to cut the legs in. So I save this back block here and then I can tape this one to that. So now I need to resaw this. This blade is a little bit on the dull side and it's not very big, so I'm actually going to swap that out for a bigger blade and hopefully that'll make it a lot easier and safer. All right, so we've got our blank now. If you look at it next to a real one, you can see that there is mainly this big taper in the head. So the head starts to taper back to this area up here. So in the past I've cut that out with a bandsaw. I find that it's easier to control with the sander, so I'm going to go over to the belt sander. So I have a bunch of different shapes and size carving tools, but I think this is so simple you can pretty much carve the whole thing with a knife. So you should try and do nice thin passes when you do this stuff. You don't want to go too deep because you'll end up making mistakes or it'll carve out a chunk of the grain. So you want to just keep it nice on the surface and it's a lot more efficient that way. All right, I scanned my knuckle on something. This is not from the knife, I swear. I do keep a strop around, even on these blades, it works really well. Keep it sharp. There's a little bit of polishing compound on there. It just freshens up that blade a little bit. It starts to get dull. So you'll notice I'll start a lot of cuts like this way, and then if I start to feel the knife dive in, I'll switch directions and carve from the other way. There's something about the grain direction, you just have to shift back and forth until you find the one that carves well. Sometimes just going 180 degrees, you'll find a much easier carving direction. So it goes, arches that way, stays nice and flat, and then arches back out. Like an hourglass shape. Stays nice and flat on the tops of the ears and along this back edge. Yeah, so I'm going to tackle the face now. I'll have to draw out some of the details. It's really simple. The main thing is that the ears have this little cut in them, and then you kind of shape the brow ridge from that. There's really a bunch of flat planes to form the face. So I need to get that right now. My horse is pretty rounded. So I'm giving a real light sanding. I don't want to lose that texture that you get from hand carving something, but it's nice to polish it up just a little bit. Okay, so I've got to sand it up to 320 grit. I'm now going to hit it with some mineral spirits, clean it off, and then put finish on it. So I'm going to do a mineral oil and paste wax finish on this. I like the look of a waxy finish on hand carved things. That's what I did on this, and it's holding up pretty well. It's a really nice sheen. So yeah, we're going to do that again. All right, so there it is. It's all finished up. It's all ready for Anne. I put a little signature on the bottom there. So all we got to do now is pack up some tools and head her way. So this is Bella here, and I feel that when I bring these guys out, then everyone gets a bunch of more spirits. These are baby belonies. Oh my god. More donkey heads would be the worst. Michael, I mean, yeah. Oh, that's cute. All right, we're ready? Yes. Hurry up. Hey Anne, thanks so much for inviting me out to your shop. Hey, no problem. This is great. I made you a little something. I hope now I won't hit the cat. I'm not, no. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's a Christmas gift. Awesome. Well, I love Christmas. Good thing we got that on camera. Oh my gosh. Okay, so it's a Dala horse. Dala, it's a Swedish horse. So my family, growing up, we'd have these set out at Christmas, and I'd carve one every year and hand them off to a friend. Oh, no way. It seemed like a perfect time to do that. Well, and animals fit in quite nicely here. Not to mention, Christmas is a big deal at this house. That's super cool. And you now are going to teach me how to do some of the other kind of carving, which is power carving. Yeah, so we're going to try some power carving. We're all suited up with our aprons and ready to go. Perfect. So we'll be doing that power carving on my channel. So if you want to head over to Animal Trades, you can see it there. Thanks so much for watching. And yeah, check out Ann's video. All right, cool.